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Gender Stereotypes In Communication

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Does your sexual identity predetermine your interests? Does one’s desire to conform to the majority choose our actions for us? We all grow up with the natural need to affiliate with one another and socialize. As stated in Man to Man, Woman to Woman and His Talk, Her Talk, our sex decides our conversational topics and ultimately divides us by our interests. Whether we are born a boy or girl, we are taught gender stereotypes, in which society decides where each sex’s interests lie, thus forming differences in communication among men and women. “Out the window go the old notions about man and aggression, woman and submission, man and intellect, woman and instinct. If I observe that my infant son prefers pushing a block along the floor while making car noises to cradling a doll in his arms and singing lullabies- well, I can only conclude that, despite all our earnest attempts at nonsexist childrearing, he has already suffered environmental contamination”, explained Joyce Maynard in His Talk, Her Talk. Children are an open book and everything they hear and see is written into the way they depict the world around them. Rebecca Martin explains the gender stereotypes shown in television in her journal, Gender and Emotional Stereotypes in Children’s T.V., such as women being the emotional caregiver and men being the aggressive, predisposed provider for the family. Martin says, “Emotion stereotypes play a role in Children’s beliefs about the behaviors that are expected and

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